LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Abortion: Women
built 656 days ago
The tendency toward abortion depended largely on community attitudes toward nonmarital pregnancy and childbearing in general, but it was ... closely tied to economics. In a developing colonial society with a land-based economy, children were generally welcomed. Economic desperation was comparatively rare, resulting in relatively low rates of abortion and infanticide. In the case of non-marital pregnancy, social pressure to name the father and demands on him to pay support eased the burden on women of even the lowest means. Paternity suits were common, the vast majority of which ended in financial support or marriage or both. The rates of premarital pregnancy in the colonies increased dramatically in the late eighteenth century, with up to 30 percent of births occurring before nine months of marriage.
Source:
Members of this church hold different opinions about the role and extent of public law and regulation in relation to abortion. The spectrum of disagreement ranges from those who believe all abortions should be prohibited by law, except to save the life of the mother, to those who oppose any law seeking to regulate abortion, except to protect the health and safety of the woman. For some, the question of pregnancy and abortion is not a matter for governmental interference, but a matter of religious liberty and freedom of conscience protected by the First Amendment. For others, the law's function in protecting life needs to include the life in the womb. Some stress the limited ability of law to stop abortions, and contend that there is increased danger to women if abortions are made illegal. They maintain that regulation takes away a woman's freedom to choose abortion as well as her freedom to affirm life by choosing to bear the child.
Source:
In many cases, middle-and upper-class women who had personal physicians maintained comparatively easy access to abortion. However, abortion rates increased among the poor and ethnic minorities. By midcentury, national concerns over shifting demographics drew attention to birth rates among the "proper stock" as opposed to those among the "lesser stock." The growing trend among white middle-and upper-class women to seek abortions was an influential factor in criminalizing the procedure. Mass immigration resulted in a growing working class that was perceived as a threat to the dominant Anglo-Protestant culture. Many physicians commonly conducted abortions among the poor and minorities, some publicly declaring that white Protestant women should have more children.
Source:
Assuming that abortion is murder... does beg the question about whether abortion is murder. Since reasonable persons disagree on that, what privacy protects is not murder, but the reckoning of conscience about whether abortion is murder or not [4]. Privacy also protects women from suspicion of murder just because of natural spontaneous abortions and miscarriages. These events are common enough and tragic and traumatic enough without adding the gratutious terror of the police showing up, perhaps with a political axe to grind, and starting an inquisition.
Source:
In the 1991 case Rust v. Sullivan, the US Supreme Court upheld the 1988 "gag rule" that prevents government-funded family planning clinics from providing information about abortion to patients. Irving Rust, MD, former medical director for the Planned Parenthood health center in the Bronx, New York, unsuccessfully argued that the "gag rule" infringed on a doctor's right to free speech. The Court declared that the enactment of Title X is ambiguous with regard to abortion counseling. This decision basically meant that women who could afford comprehensive reproductive healthcare could obtain it, but those women who could not would be subjected to reproductive health care that put political agendas before the reproductive health and freedom of the patient.
Source:
Ancient civilizations largely looked upon abortion as a woman's individual affair, in which no person, organization or government had any right to intrude. As C. Gasquoine Hartley put it, "Each woman must be free to make her own choice; no man may safely decide for her; she must give life gladly to be able to give it well."1 But with the escalation of patriarchal dogmas and religions - particularly amongst the Greeks - came a conviction that a father's semen channeled the soul into the fetus. Men feared for the freedom from harm any of their body effluvia2 for fear that black magic might be used to traumatize the living man by harming what was once a component of him. The horror was especially accentuated in the instance of sperm as an annexation of the father's soul. If the fetus he fathered were irreparably damaged, then without a doubt or question he himself would endure ethereal affliction concurring with the axioms (of the time) of magick. St. Thomas Aquinas3 held to this same sentiment, since he maintained that semen was the author of souls.4 It was a logical progression of this vagary that abortion should (and must) be disallowed, not because it was fraught with danger to women, but rather because it was rationalized (magickally) to be dangerous to men.
Source:
MORE ABOUT
Women